William Rubel - Bread: A Global History

Flatbread, loaf bread, fried bread, bean bread, corn bread; they are all breads. Yet when asked to go to the store to buy bread for dinner, most readers of this book will pass up all types of bread except the loaf breads. There is an accepted ambiguity in the way we use the term bread that lets us both recognize bread as a hugely wide classification of foodstuffs, and to think of bread for our own table as a more narrowly defined concept. When the Spanish encountered the flat maize tortilla of Mexico they immediately recognized it as the bread of the local inhabitants. On the other hand, they also did not classify it as bread. To this day the Mexican bakery that produces tortillas, the tortilleria, is institutionally distinct from the bakery that produces wheat breads, the panaderia. Going back as much as 2,000 years people from Europes loaf-bread cultures, when commenting on bread, have consistently acknowledged the bread of others, while insisting on the aesthetic and healthful primacy of the type of loaf bread white preferred by the social elite.

Throughout this book I move back and forth between a cosmopolitan reference to all breads as bread and a more narrow focus on the loaf bread as being the one true bread. This fuzziness is partly captured in how the most authoritativeEnglish-language dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary ( OED ), defines bread:

A well-known article of food prepared by moistening, kneading and baking meal or flour, generally with the addition of yeast or leaven.

One way to read this definition is an admission by the lexicographer that bread is so much a cultural object that it means too many things to too many people to be pinned down. The OED is really saying that bread without adjectives is more the purview of the anthropologist than the lexicographer: cultural usage determines meaning, so to find the precise meaning of bread, consult the culture you want to use as the reference point.

The OED places kneading at the centre of its bread definition. While bread is certainly usually made with a kneaded dough, and as for short-hand convenience it can be helpful to put kneaded dough at the centre of its definition, there are many examples of batters that produce products that have played the functional role of kneaded breads: the many forms of the North American cornbread are an obvious example of a bread that falls outside the OED definition. The buckwheat crpe of Brittany and the teff ingera of Ethiopia are pancakes that fill the role of a kneaded bread in their respective traditional culinary cultures. While this book is primarily focused on the product of kneaded dough, and specifically leavened kneaded dough, it does not impose arbitrary limits on the edges of the definition.

Bread is a concept. Bread is not harvested by farmers, it is manufactured by bakers. As an invention of culture the concept of bread can change. However, in practice, while concepts of what makes a good bread good do change withtime, the core European concept of what bread is has been remarkably stable for thousands of years. Important edges to European culinary cultures definition of bread are these: kneaded or not kneaded. Lean or fatty. Salty or sweet. Dough or batter. Thick or thin. Leavened or unleavened. Big or small. In some cases singly, in others in combination, these edges mark the borders of bread and cake, of bread and flatbread, of bread and pancake, of loaf and roll. If one eliminates the overriding importance of the loaf shape, and thus accepts both leavened and unleavened flatbreads into the pantheon of daily breads, then these edges fairly universally define bread for every culture for which bread is of culinary importance, regional exceptions notwithstanding.

This book is an introduction to bread as a food and as a cultural object. Each of us who lives within a bread culture is, in fact, an expert on bread. But we dont all have the vocabulary to talk about it. One of the purposes of this book is to call attention to ways of thinking about bread that show that every loaf has a multi-layered story to tell. Bread is so twined with culture that one can start from a loaf of bread and find oneself talking about some of the largest issues of history and society. Sometimes a bread can be like a mirror reflecting back ones own image, ones own dreams, even. Why did you choose that particular bread for serving at a dinner for company? Bread is such a deliciously complex object that the answer to that question could be the story of ones life.